Storytelling

I thought about storytelling over breakfast. The previous line in itself could be a story. It is difficult to think about what is the basic unit of a story – one word or part of a word might be sufficient. Story probably has its origin in thought and the spoken word and then writing, but now all kinds of media are used to tell stories. Story is in the fabric of everyday life from recounting what we have done during the day to recollecting our thoughts at the end of the day and into our dreams. It is in media news and everyday conversation. It is the art and craft of professional media providing us with mediated memories. It is experience ordered…and disordered. The limit of language and the exercise of meaning.

When some people say that they don’t use social media they might suggest that they are not interested in finding out what people had for breakfast.  Their story is that social media is trivial and full of mundane material that they don’t have time for. Certainly it would not be at all surprising to find tweets or status updates about breakfast since social media like all media is embedded in habitual life. And this is where the addition of ‘digital’ to storytelling becomes problematic. I am not keen on driving a wedge between the online/offline. It is, as Howard Rheingold suggests, just part of everything that we do. Our lives are analogue and digital and storyful. I am familiar with the concept of ‘digital storytelling’ and the way it has been used to address the way that it might be possible to make either new stories or stories in new ways using digital technology through the opening up of media technology to a much wider user group. So it is difficult for me to think about [digital] storytelling in a naive way. But I am looking forward to giving it more thought. BTW, I had cereal with vanilla soya milk and coffee with milk for breakfast this morning. Outside, the fringes of frost refused to be dislodged from the edges of the earth.

Social Media Storytelling – ‘Breakfast’